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More than ever, in our world’s demand for innovation, your Big Idea needs a place to incubate, to grow, and to learn from others. It’s hard enough to let your Big Idea take shape when your entire team is together.

But what happens when your thinkers span states, countries, time zones?

Your Big Idea gets neglected. Other obligations make more noise. Remote collaboration becomes too difficult. Logistics get in the way. People aren’t given the environment they need to collaborate. Innovation and deep thinking is sacrificed for surviving the next wave of emails. The Big Idea sits neglected.

You might find the top killers of your Big Idea look a little more familiar than you’d expect.

Ok, we always think that quoting Vanilla Ice is much funnier than it really is. Thanks for indulging us. Let’s talk about collaboration—check out these cool collaboration station carts that D’Arcy Norman at The Taylor Institute at the University of Calgary has installed Limnu on.

Limnu is all about collaboration. You need other people drawing with you, and that means sharing your boards. Whether you share your boards via Slack, with a link or with a share code we have the right solution for you.

Share Codes

Today we're going to talk about Share Codes. These are great when you want to share your board with people using one of the Limnu mobile apps (get the iOS app here and the Android one here) or when you want to share with a room full of people. Just give them the share code and instead of trying to type in a long web address.

We've made sharing a Limnu board even easier by making our share codes shorter—and dare we say more fun?

So, for all you crazy tarsiers and regular people, let's look at the new share codes.

Many of our customers asked to be able to turn off collaboration temporarily, and prevent anyone else from drawing for a while. This feature is handy if you need to talk about your initial ideas before you collaborate, or focus the conversation and set the right context before letting everyone loose on your board.

If you work with digital images that have transparency in them, and use any software besides Photoshop, you might run into the term “premultiplied alpha.” Texture artists, compositors, film-makers, technical directors, game artists, and graphics programmers all run into premultiplied alpha sooner or later. Premultiplied alpha sounds like a mathematical mouthful, so what does it mean?

Despite the intimidating "mathy" sounding name, premultiplied alpha is actually a very simple and non-technical concept. Let me break it down for you.

We're big fans of hot dogs at Limnu. We weighed in on the "is a hot dog a sandwich" way back in November. This time though, we've outdone ourselves.

A few of us were at a BBQ last night when a friend's kid said, "I wonder what it would taste like if we blended a hot dog, bun and everything, into a smoothie". Dave (our CTO), who is never one to turn down a good time, said, "I'm sure they have a blender here!". Next thing you know, we're in the kitchen blending a hot dog. Little more ketchup, little apple juice to smooth it out, and just like that, hot dog pâté.

Limnu has been around for a while now and we've been asked several times for an explainer video to show what makes Limnu so special. Working with some guys from the film industry means we can have some pretty big ideas. As in, "you worked on the Matrix, right? So our video should..." And yet, it didn't. No video. For months, no video.

My bus ride to and from the Limnu office is about half an hour each way. I like to spend that time listening to podcasts. I like all kinds of them: science, comedy, news, arts, startup advice (natch), and everything in between.

I recently started listening to Linear Digressions hosted by Katie Malone and Ben Jaffe, and it's already one of my favorites. They talk about data science and machine learning, and they present it in a very approachable way.

Whoa, hang on! I know some of you saw that previous paragraph and thought "well, that's not for me". Bear with me for a minute: it's not as scary as it sounds, it's actually pretty cool. And this post ends with a photo of some amazing coastlines. Stick around, this will be fun!